The totally revamped StructuredBlogging.org site has gone live. Richard MacManus and the gang have done a tremendous job and I think it is now communicating the whole idea in a far more effective way than it did in the past. They explain it far better than I can here so go and have a read.
If you read this blog regularly, you will have noticed some posts which appear to have more structure than others (mainly my reviews and event notifications). It takes no extra effort for me to do the posts in that form and in fact, in some ways, makes it a lot easier. So even if there was no other upside than making reviews easier to write, I would be happy to make use of the Structured Blogging software.
But the long term aim of the effort is to enable new web-sites and services which can make use of that extra structure and create systems we haven’t even dreamt about yet. This is one of those efforts which is very dependent on average bloggers like me generating the content in the first place so I am happy to do my little bit and get my own benefits too.
Richard very kindly mentioned me in his announcement of the re-vamp, but to be honest I did very little and should have helped more. Also, I have been very remiss in not following up on the structured recipe ideas which was tossed around recently. Unfortunately a new work location with a shockin' commute is chewing up a lot of my time (and the garden is in a brutal state!). I really do want to get started on this again as there is already discussion on the microformats site about a recipe microformat to which I should contribute.
If you have a Moveable Type or Wordpress Blog (not wordpress.com), I really really encourage you to install the Structured Blogging plug-in and play with it. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by its utility. And once some of those new services start being rolled out, you’ll find yourself wayyyy ahead of the game!
If you are interested in some of the ideas on where Marc Canter thinks this is all going, have a read of the roadmap.
The Pubsub guys who do a lot of the work on structured blogging have their own announcement here.
Also, if you wonder about the importance of microformats which underpin structured blogging, well a certain Bill G is a fan.
Finally, Bob Wyman of Pubsub has a superb post on the open web vs the closed web and how structured blogging is part of the open revolution. In fact there are many compelling arguments being made on the structured blogging mailing list which I wish were being re-published by their authors on their blogs.
[tags]StructuredBlogging.org, Structured Blogging, Microformats[/tags]
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